The Black Hills

by William W. Johnstone

  “Don’t worry, Pa,” Hunter said, “I’ve packed all your toys.”

  He and Annabelle continued leading Angus to the old buckboard to which the mule was hitched. Hunter’s grullo, Nasty Pete, and Annabelle’s buckskin, Ivan—both saddled—were tied to the wagon’s tailgate. Chaney’s men had run off the Buchanons’ other horses, housed in two separate corrals, but the mule had been stabled in the barn.

  Annabelle had filled the wagon box with what few foodstuffs she’d found in the kitchen—mostly potatoes, a ham, fatback, some flour, cornmeal, sugar, and coffee. With animal skins, she’d made a comfortable nest for Angus, and at the top of the nest were two thick pillows upon which he could rest his head.

  His weapons and his rucksack stuffed with ammunition were piled in a corner, near the water barrel Hunter had filled at the well. Bobby Lee sat atop the water barrel, on the thick wooden lid, licking his front paw like a cat and using the wet paw to clean behind his ear.

  When Hunter and Annabelle got Angus settled in the wagon, Hunter helped Anna back down to the ground. Hunter turned to face the lodge that he and his pa and brothers had built by hand, by the sweat of their brows. He glanced around at the barn and the corrals, at Angus’s brew barn and at Shep’s blacksmith shop out front of which the finely churned dirt of the yard was still stained with the eldest Buchanon brother’s blood.

  Hunter looked down over his right shoulder. Anna stood close beside him, her arm against his, the back of her hand resting lightly against his own.

  She’d been following his gaze, the breeze gently brushing her hair back against her cheeks, as he’d studied all that he and Angus were leaving behind. The loss he felt not only for the ranch headquarters but for his beloved brothers was a rusty knife in his belly. At the same time, it felt good to have this beautiful, smart, brave young woman standing beside him.

  In some crazy way, despite all the terrible things that had happened in the past two days, something still seemed right with the world for the simple reason that Anna was in it with him. She would stand beside him, fight with him, to the end. Hunter Buchanon was a tall, broad-shouldered man. But with this woman beside him, he felt just a little taller, just a little broader.

  As though curious about the turn of her man’s thoughts, Anna looked up at him, frowning quizzically.

  “Thank you,” he said quietly.

  She gave him a slow blink, and the corners of her beautiful mouth drew up with a smile. “We’d best light a shuck,” she said. “We’re burning daylight.”

  Hunter walked around to the wagon’s left front side, and climbed up over the wheel. Anna walked around to the opposite side, and climbed over that wheel, settling herself on the leather-padded wooden seat. Behind her on the water barrel Bobby Lee gave an anxious moan, bending each ear forward in turn and tilting his head, anxious and puzzled.

  Anna reached back and patted the coyote’s head reassuringly.

  Hunter released the wagon’s brake. He clucked to old Titus, getting him started, then, the mule braying with characteristic incredulity, swung around to head southwest, powdering the sage off the cabin’s west rear corner. He followed a slight crease in the land, fragrant pines falling in around the wagon, and headed straight south through the buttes.

  “Is that my boys’ graves up there?” Angus asked behind Hunter and Anna, above the wagon’s rattle and squawk.

  Hunter glanced back at the old man, then followed his gaze to the rise on which Shep’s and Tye’s graves were mounded, shaded by a large, sprawling fir.

  “Yeah,” Hunter said. “That’s them, Pa.”

  Angus hardened his jaws again. A muscle in his cheek twitched.

  “Rest easy, sons,” he bellowed. He sobbed and then raked out hoarsely, “You will be avenged!”

  Bobby Lee lifted his long, pointed snout and yammered fiercely in agreement.

  * * *

  They’d crested the first hill south of the 4-Box-B fifteen minutes after leaving the headquarters, when Hunter turned to his left, staring at a young ponderosa pine standing like a sentinel at the crest of the rocky ridge. The wind was blowing hard up here, blowing cones out of the trees.

  Hunter glanced at Annabelle. “Take the reins for a few minutes, will you?”

  “What are you going to do?” she asked, reaching for the reins.

  “One last thing.”

  As Annabelle took control of the wagon, Hunter leaped to the ground.

  When Nasty Pete came up beside him, Hunter tugged the slipknotted reins free of the steel ring in the tailgate and stepped into the leather. He looked at Angus. The mossy horn appeared especially old and shrunken beneath the quilts and blankets that Anna had pulled up to his chin, covering most of his long beard.

  Angus’s eyelids were squeezed shut. Deep lines cut across his saddle-leather forehead mottled with liver spots. More lines than normal. Angus was sound asleep, his frail body rocking with the wagon’s pitching and jerking as it clattered over the ridge crest and started down the other side, not following any trail but cutting cross-country. Angus’s lips moved as though he were having a conversation with himself in his sleep.

  Or maybe a conversation with the men who’d killed his sons. A bitter one.

  The old man may have been dozing, but he was in misery—in both mind and body.

  “Let Titus pick his own way down the ridge, Anna,” Hunter said. “I’ll catch up to you by the time you reach the next valley.” He saw Bobby Lee watching him expectantly, ears pricked, getting ready to leap off the barrel to the ground. “Stay with the wagon, Bobby.”

  The coyote groaned and lay belly-down atop the barrel, crossing his front paws.

  Annabelle looked at Hunter again curiously, vaguely troubled, then nodded and said, “Hurry.”

  Hunter touched spurs to Nasty Pete’s flanks and trotted eastward along the crest of the ridge, weaving around shrubs and small rock outcroppings. He pulled up about twenty yards from the young ponderosa, and swung down from Nasty Pete’s back. He dropped the reins and Pete stomped his left front foot, working some brome grass free of a small rock snag, and began grazing.

  Hunter looked at the young pine. He and his brothers had brought it from their north-Georgia farm nearly eight years ago. Back then, it had been a slender seedling. They’d wrapped the dirt-sheathed ball of its tender roots in wet burlap and, keeping the burlap wet, hauled it all the way here to the Black Hills of southern Dakota Territory.

  The tree had grown from a seed on their mother’s grave. While they hadn’t been able to move their mother’s body out here with the rest of her family, they’d been able to move the next best thing, the seedling they’d believed represented her spirit, so she could reside with them here in their new home, watching over the boisterous all-male family from the crest of this rocky ridge in much the same way she’d done in life back in Georgia.

  The only difference was that in life Emilia Buchanon often had a spoon or a cast-iron skillet in her hand, both of which she’d wielded threateningly when the need arose, which it often had—the boys being the rowdy trio they were, fathered by the wild old mountain catamount, Angus Buchanon himself.

  While beautiful in her younger days, before the years of tough mountain living and then disease had eroded away her youthful vivacity and tempered the sparkle in her eyes as well as the flush in her cheeks, Emilia Buchanon had been as tough as an oak knot right up to the day she’d succumbed to her affliction.

  Annabelle reminded Hunter of his stalwart mother. Emilia had been a tough Southern mountain woman, hailing from hardy Scottish stock from a boggy hollow to the west of where Angus had grown up. As tough as Emilia had been, she hadn’t cottoned to men killing other men, whatever the reason. She’d disdained guns beyond their usefulness in supplying meat for the larder.

  For that reason, on one of his rare visits home during the war, Hunter had promised her, a badly ailing woman by that time, coughing out her lungs in bloody bits, that as soon as the war was over he’d rid himself of h
is shooting irons—all but the rifles he used to hunt game. He’d also promised his mother that he would never again kill another man. Not for any reason.

  That’s why it was with a heavy heart and sinking feeling of dread and even fear that he walked slowly over to a pile of rocks not far from the tree that memorialized Emilia Buchanon. Before the cairn, he stopped and faced the tree.

  He ran his tongue along the underside of his upper lip, drew a deep breath, and said, “I’m sorry, Momma. But when I made that promise, I hadn’t expected this.”

  He dropped to a knee and removed the rocks from the pile two at a time. Beneath the rocks was a shallow hole filled with dirt. He used his hands to dig up the dirt and gravel and toss it aside until he’d dug up the old Confederate gray rucksack, badly faded, a gilded eagle stitched on its flap. He shook off the dirt and brushed off the rest.

  He opened the flap, reached into the pouch, and pulled out an old, battered, and timeworn Confederate campaign hat. He shaped the hat as best he could, removed his newer Stetson, and set the old campaigner on his head. It molded right to it. Inside the hat had been a necklace of grizzly claws—a trophy he’d attained himself when he’d killed the grizzly that had stalked him back in the mountains of his Georgia home, when he’d been hunting a wildcat that had been feeding on their cattle. He’d strung the claws on a long strip of braided rawhide and worn the necklace during the war, having been told by an old north Georgia mountain man once that the spirit of the bear brings luck to young warriors.

  He dropped the necklace over his head, letting it hang down across his broad chest, over his linsey-woolsey tunic, beneath his knotted green neckerchief.

  Again, he reached into the sack. This time, he withdrew a worn leather holster and cartridge belt. The belt loops still shone brightly with brass .44-caliber cartridges. On the left side was attached a sheathed bowie knife with a hide-wrapped handle and brass knuckle haft. Shep had built the handsome pig-sticker himself, before Hunter had left for the war. The gun holster attached to the cartridge belt’s right side was so worn it was nearly the texture of ancient buckskin, and it formed the shape of a sharp-nosed V.

  Hunter drew another breath and unsnapped the keeper thong from over the hammer of the stout, heavy, long-barreled pistol residing in the holster. He wrapped his hand around the glistening pearl grips, as smooth as polished marble, and slid the gun from the holster.

  He held it before him—a silver-washed LeMat with a seven-and-a-half-inch-main .44-caliber barrel and a shorter, stouter twelve-gauge shotgun barrel tucked underneath. The beautiful weapon—as fine a piece of shooting equipment as Hunter had ever seen—was hand-engraved with tiny oak leaves and a breech lever in the shape of a miniature saber.

  His own initials, HB, had been carved into each side of the long, sleek main barrel by the man who’d gifted him with the gun after Hunter had saved the man’s life from a sharpshooter’s bullet. That man had been none other than the Confederate general Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard, or “Little Creole” as he’d been known . . . even though there’d been nothing little about G. T. Beauregard’s fighting spirit.

  The LeMat had been his own, designed by himself and fashioned on commission by a French gunsmith in New Orleans. After Hunter had saved the general from a sharpshooter’s bullet at Shiloh, taking the bullet himself, Beauregard had ordered a crafty gunsmith to change the monogram. He then gifted the handsome piece to the young Georgia Rebel who’d saved his life and whose own fighting spirit had already made Hunter Buchanon something of a legend, his name spoken nightly in admiring tones around Confederate cook fires.

  G. T. Beauregard, a dusky-skinned little man with dark eyes and a dark mustache, had handed the weapon over to the starry-eyed young warrior late one night in a hospital tent on one condition—that Hunter recover from his leg wound and continue killing the venal Yankees.

  Hunter had vowed he would.

  And he’d done just that.

  More than his own fair share, even—at least, to his own mind.

  He’d killed so many Yankees that killing had sickened him to the point that, following his mother’s wishes, he’d buried the gun here under rocks, as a totem of sorts to his mother’s will. He’d wanted to bury the gun back in Georgia, soon after he’d returned home from the war, but something inside him had prevented him from doing so. That something in him had worried and frightened him.

  Was the killing spirit inside him so strong that he’d never be able to part with it completely?

  He’d had plenty of time to ponder the matter on the way west with his father and brothers and the spirit of his mother enshrined in the pine seedling. Right after he and his father and brothers had planted the tree, Hunter had stolen up here to the ridge—secretly, under cover of darkness—and buried the LeMat under the rocks. He’d prayed to the spirit of Emilia Buchanon to forgive him for his reluctance to part with the instrument of so much death.

  He prayed to her spirit again now, beseeching her forgiveness for digging it up.

  He strapped it around his waist, trying to ignore the fact that the big popper felt good and familiar there against his thigh. He tied the holster thong around his leg, just above the knee.

  He said, “Sorry, Momma, but I know you’d understand. . . given the circumstances. There’s one more war this Buchanon has to fight.”

  Hunter swung back up onto Nasty Pete’s back and galloped down the ridge toward the wagon.

  CHAPTER 24

  Frank Stillwell had to shake the dew from his lily.

  Or so he told himself.

  The truth was, he was feeling a little shaken again this morning. Not fearful. At least, not fearful in the way he’d so shamefully displayed just days ago by running inside his office and locking the door, then leaping out a window when Hunter Buchanon had followed him inside, bloody murder blazing in his Rebel eyes.

  No, not fearful in that way. But fearful of the fear. Of the fear coming back.

  Fear of the way people in Tigerville were looking at him these days. Not really looking at him but sort of glancing at him sidelong so that he could see them peeking at him out of the corner of his eye but when he turned to face them straight on, they’d already turned away and were going about their business as if he wasn’t even there.

  As if they’d never given him that quick, skeptical, vaguely jeering gaze, wondering what kind of sand the man really had or if he had no sand at all. Maybe he was the faker that Graham Ludlow suspected he was.

  Of course, Stillwell himself knew he wasn’t a faker. He’d had a momentary lapse, was all. A fleeting loss of nerve. Deep down, he was a brave man. A cold-blooded killer who ran from no man. At least, he would run from no man ever again.

  Or so he told himself. Now, as he finished his breakfast in the Dakota Territorial’s saloon—at the same table near the front window at which he’d been sitting when Ludlow had joined him yesterday—he finished his third cup of coffee spiced with a healthy jigger of rye and slid his chair back. That fear of the fear coming back, his revulsion at his own actions and of the looks the townsfolk were giving him, were making his insides twist around the bacon and eggs and fried potatoes he’d just eaten.

  It was pressing on his bladder.

  Time to shake the dew from his lily. Maybe to sit down for a spell, take a good long dump, and have a long think over the privy hole.

  His consternation hadn’t been tempered by his learning that somehow Hunter Buchanon and Ludlow’s daughter had survived the cave-in. It truly was as though Buchanon wasn’t quite human. Or something more than human, maybe.

  How could he and the girl have survived? There must have been a rear exit to the mine shaft, the sheriff figured, frustration raking him hard. Humiliation at how they must have laughed at him blazed inside him.

  He’d only known that they would be out there together because someone had left him a note the previous night at the Dakota Territorial’s front desk, and the clerk had slipped the note under the door to his room. An uns
igned note.

  There is an old prospector’s cabin at the base of Crow Ridge, five miles west of town. H. Buchanon and his Yankee sweetheart will be there early tomorrow morning.

  Stillwell had figured the missive had been penned by some concerned citizen who’d wanted to remain nameless to protect himself. Or herself. Stillwell had no idea who’d penned the note, but the penciled scribbling had appeared decidedly masculine.

  How the writer had known about the tryst, Stillwell couldn’t fathom. He wasn’t in any position, however, to look a gift horse in the mouth. He had been suspicious of a trap, and that’s why he’d ridden out there well armed and extra cautious. He’d wanted to wound Buchanon and drag both him and Annabelle Ludlow to town, so the town could watch Buchanon hang. But Stillwell just hadn’t been able to pass up caving the mine down on top of the two lovers.

  He’d relished the idea of them dying together, slowly suffocating or starving . . . together.

  Of knowing that kind of bone-splintering fear not so dissimilar from what the sheriff felt the day before he had enacted the gruesome scheme . . .

  The Grayback and Graham Ludlow’s uppity daughter, too good for any other man in the county. But not for the former ex-Confederate, Hunter Buchanon.

  Now Stillwell scrubbed the napkin across his mustache, set his hat on his head, and started to turn toward the back door at the end of the dark little corridor flanking the horseshoe bar. He stopped suddenly with an incredulous grunt, grimacing as he stared at the morning barkeep, Clancy Becker, who stood behind the bar polishing the inside of a thick schooner with a bar cloth.

  Stillwell squared his shoulders at the rail-thin, dour-faced, and balding Becker, and set his fists on his hips with an air of open confrontation. “What the hell were you looking at, Clancy?”